


Something Bad

by iwritesinsnotnovels



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Gen, HIV/AIDS, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 19:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14244168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwritesinsnotnovels/pseuds/iwritesinsnotnovels
Summary: "He was right, there was something happening, something bad, something potent as a poisonous gas, creeping down streets, under doors, into homes, and taking all that breathed it in."ORTrina and Mendel reflect on the disease taking over their lives.





	Something Bad

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm super busy with school at the moment so I don't know when I'll next update Remains (you should still check it out if you haven't already!), but, hey, I randomly wrote this little thing, so thought I'd share. Let me know your thoughts, and have a good day!

Before it happened, before everything fell apart, when Jason still laughed and Marvin still left his bed and Whizzer still lived, Mendel turned off the TV and said, “Trina, I need to tell you something.”

Trina couldn’t remember him calling her that since he’d been her psychiatrist (well, her ex-husband’s, technically, but as with everything to do with Marvin, the people in his life had a habit of spilling into hers and leaving a stain, quick as blood). Rather, Mendel seemed to take great pleasure in his usage of various pet names. Darling, sweetheart, my love. Look at me, he seemed to be saying. Look at my wife.

Therefore, at his words, and the forced calm with which he said them, she felt her chest tighten in her throat in a way she previously hadn’t felt since she married Mendel, but in the last few months had felt really quite a lot. When she spoke, though, her voice was just as still, “What is it, darling?”

Mendel looked at her, then away. He played with the edge of the sofa throw, rubbing the loose threads between his fingers, coiling them and knotting them. His mouth opened, then shut. Trina, watching him so intensely her head was starting to hurt, felt the fluttering panic in her heart die into numb recognition. She knew what this was. Of course, she knew what this was.

“You’re leaving me, aren’t you?”

Mendel tilted his head, frowned. “Of course I’m not.  I love you, I love you so much, why… why would you…? I love you,” he said, and Trina felt relief flood through her, “I’ll never leave you, you know that. It’s nothing about that. It’s…” His voice faltered. “It’s about Marvin.”

“What about Marvin?” said Trina, more quickly than she meant to, because she _hated_ Marvin. She had hated him for a long time, loathed him even, but, then, he was still Jason’s father, and still her ex-husband. There was still some semblance of a bond between them- call it ivy, stubbornly spreading its tendrils over time, even on the dead and dying, but still. But, still.

Mendel swallowed. “I overheard Charlotte telling him that this disease that Whizzer has, it can be… it can be spread. From… from one man to another, she said.”

Trina was silent for a moment. She could feel her thoughts whirring, racing, running though her hands like sand in an hourglass. “Doctor Allen said he’s got pneumonia.”

“Doctor Allen is lying,” said Mendel.

“No he’s not.”

“He’s not telling the whole truth, then.”

Trina paused. Her father was a doctor. Marry a doctor, her mother had always said, they’re the richest people in the world, and they’re honest with it. (Of course, she had married an accountant, who lied to her the entire time they were together.)

“Why would he do that?”

“The same reason the newspapers are lying,” Mendel said, expression suddenly uglier than Trina had ever seen it, “The government is lying. Because they don’t want to acknowledge, don’t _care_ about a disease if it’s mostly taking queers.”

His words seemed to ring in the silence, out of place amongst the clean walls, the picture frames, the menorah, all the things that showed off the charade of the perfect Jewish normality. It would be Chanukah soon. Trina wondered if Whizzer would be dead by then.

“I don’t see what this has to do with us,” Trina said eventually.

Mendel’s face twisted, not in anger, but in disappointment. He had a big heart. It was why he became a psychiatrist, after all. Trina had been like that once, but then her life happened, and now, she found she couldn’t care about anything whatsoever.

“Marvin is going to die,” said Mendel, and despite everything that had happened, Trina recoiled, “It might be months, it might be years, but you can guarantee Whizzer’s given him the disease. That’s why Charlotte told him. And worse, if this thing is contagious, which I think it’s pretty clear it is, half the population of New York could have it by now. And that’s not even thinking about the rest of the country, the rest of the world, even.”

There was a man in the bed next to Whizzer. He changed every couple of weeks, but was always skinny and coughing and very much alone. Cordelia gave him squashed latkes and rugelach; Jason played chess with him, sometimes, perhaps letting him win a game or two before the man was gone, replaced by stripped back sheets and then another version of himself before the day had passed. Once, he had said to Trina, voice choked with a death-rattle but still filled with something like satisfaction, or perhaps pride, “This disease is it, you know. It’s gonna kill us all.”

“We can’t get it, though,” said Trina, “All I’ve heard about it, in the newspapers-“

Mendel’s face contorted again, this time in disgust. Marvin found Mendel’s expressions funny, mocked them behind his back, sometimes, until Whizzer nudged him and they both dissolved into laughter. That felt like a long time ago, now. Trina couldn’t remember the last time either of them had laughed, the last time Marvin had found something funny at all.

 “There’s nothing _in_ the newspapers, Trina.”

“What people are saying, then. It’s only queers that are getting it. It doesn’t affect normal people.”

Her voice was full of desperation. Mendel said, “Maybe right now it’s only them that have got it, but it’ll spread. Epidemics don’t pick and choose their victims.”

 _Epidemic._ The word felt too shocking, too much. It referred to long ago diseases, like the black death, not something so present and raw. Not something that was affecting her life so desperately. Trina shook her head, weakly. “You’re wrong. If- if you were right, then it would be a thing, right? People can’t just die with the whole country ignoring it.”

“They can,” said Mendel, “And they are.”

Trina didn’t say anything, waiting for Mendel to keep talking, tell her what to do, what to think, because he was right, there was something happening, something bad, something potent as a poisonous gas, creeping down streets, under doors, into homes, and taking all that breathed it in.

She waited, but he didn’t say anything else, just stared at the floor, clasping and unclasping his hands in front of him. She recognised the movement, it was something Marvin did sometimes. She wondered if it was something he had picked up from him. She wondered if it was just her, seeing the ghost of her ex-husband, of her past life, in everything.

She didn’t realise she was clutching her own hands too until Mendel gently took them apart.

“What if you got it?” said Trina, “If you died, I think I would die too.”

She didn’t think, she knew. Mendel was her everything. He was the blood in her veins and the air she breathed. He was the sun she revolved around and all the stars in her sky. There was no think, no maybe. She sensed rather than saw him frown.

“You can’t say that. Not when…”

His voice trailed away, but he didn’t need to finish. If Mendel was Trina’s oxygen and her stars, Whizzer was Marvin’s universe. Without him, he would disappear completely.

“I’m scared,” said Trina, and she didn’t know which man’s death she was referring to. Perhaps all of them. Perhaps all of humankind would die, while the men with the power looked on, blank and uncaring. Trina glanced, then, at her husband, and his smile was wobbly as he said, “So am I.”


End file.
